Monday, June 24, 2013

Review: Flashpoint Miniatures Vietnamese Huts and Palm Trees

Flashpoint Miniatures is an Australian wargame company that makes 15mm miniatures for Vietnam War and Modern Middle East conflicts. Their Vietnam ranges not only includes a variety of troops and vehicles, but also terrain. I recently picked up two sets of five huts for $25 a set and two packs of 24 palm trees for $15. That gave me 10 huts and 48 palm trees for $80.

The huts are small single cast pieces. They do not have removable roofs and are slightly smaller than a medium FoW base. These pieces remind me of many of the older buildings available from JR Miniatures. Even though they are smaller and do not have removable roofs, I still really like these huts. The price is nice and I feel like the huts look better on the table scale wise than some of the larger huts available from other manufactures. Each pack has a variety of five different resin huts. This variety will give your Vietnamese village a good feel.

Talk about value. The assorted palm tree packs are the way to go. 24 palm trees for $15. The palm trees come in six different sizes and shapes. I based mine on washers and flocked the base. The trees are soft plastic and remind me of decorations you put onto a birthday cake. The plastic gave them a shinny look, so I hit them with some flat matte when was done and dulled them up. I have only based up half of the trees so far (I ran out of washers). The trees I did up are by far the best looking out of the set. The other trees not pictured are smaller, and while they still look good feel a bit undersized on their own. Still this is a fantastic set of trees. What I really like is the come table ready, there is no need to paint them. All you need to do i find a base for them.

The trees and huts mix well and look good next to FoW figures. One of the down sides is ordering from Australia. Shipping was an unexpected additional cost. I would recommended looking at the rest of the Flashpoint Miniatures range and make a big order. Thats what we did, so it wasn't too bad.

I give the huts 7 out of 10 bamboo shoots and ladders and the palm trees 9 out of 10 birthday cakes.
The value for the trees cannot be beat, while the huts are more about personal preference. I love the huts, but I think gamers who want to put their troops insude won't like them.

At a minimum, if you are interested in Nam and your local shop or webstore is out of Battlefront stock, take a look at Flashpoint Miniatures for your Vietnam needs.

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“Craig Baxter is the Director of the WWPD Northern Research center in Anchorage, AK. When he’s not contributing to WWPD.net he is busy blogging, painting, modeling and rolling dice. You can find more of his work and articles at frozengamerak.blogspot.com.”